Journal

Friday, November 9, 2012

Damian frowned, but did as he was
told. As he turned back toward the mirror, something happened. A shimmer? A
flash of light? He couldn’t honestly have said. His eyes seemed to squint at
the same time they were being thrown wide. It felt as if the world around him
suddenly got sharper, more vivid, and not the least bit… prickly.

That was the best description he
could muster. Something about the air around him poked at him, prodded him,
grated against him. Yet at the same time, it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. It
was a pain that hovered on the verge of pleasure. A seductive tremor.

“What is…?” Damian trailed off.

He noticed his reflection in the
mirror for the first time, and the image took his breath away. He’d expected,
well, himself. The same boring visage that stared back any other time he made
use of a mirror.

What he saw instead was a battled-hardened
street tough. Oh, the shape was still his, but everything inside was not, like
a coloring book where a child has used all the wrong colors. Orange grass,
green sky, a purple sun.

The arms of the man in the mirror
were corded with muscle, taunt and twisting beneath gray, heavily scarred skin.
Tattoos wound around his wrists and crawled up under his shirt, except they weren't ink; they were furrows, intricate designs carved directly into the skin. The cloth covering his legs was ripped, as if he’d just gotten out of a
particularly nasty fight, and his knuckles were raw and bleeding.

Still, it was not the grisly body
that frightened him the most. Rather, it was his face. The designs on his arms
snaked up the back of his neck and wrapped over the top of his bald head,
tapering to seven points where his hairline should have been. His cheeks were
sunken and severe, his mouth a grim line. It was still his basic
bone-structure, but harder. More chiseled. Even the eyes staring back at him
seemed full of stony chips, and deep in the heart of his irises, flames danced.

Damian stretched one gnarled hand
outward, and then took and involuntary step back as his reflection did the
same. “W-what? What is this?”

Damian tried to find her in the
edges of the mirror, but one of the overhead lights seemed like it was
amplified by the strange phenomenon. It was far too bright and stabbed at his
forced open eyes. He held up an arm, trying to shield himself from the
radiance, but it didn’t help.

Squinting, Damian turned to look
for his friend, and the spell was broken. The room muted out. Genny stood
nearby, arms folded and looking somewhat embarrassed.

@EAM - I'm going through quite the life-transition right now as well. Obviously, it's that sort of adversity that inspired this. Insecurity seems, to me, an essential part of any transition. Change is scary, right?